No, he agreed. It wasn't. "How do you feel about it?" "Honestly?" He thought about it.
"Relieved. And something else, something that I can't decide is appropriate to feel. "What?" "Grateful to her." He said, which is strange because the past two months have been, he stopped.
She put me through something real. The fear was real. But she also raised Ava. She's Ava's mother. And today she chose Ava over the thing she wanted.
"That's not a strange thing to feel," Clare said, ""That's generous." "Maybe." He wrapped both hands around the mug. I don't want to co-parent in conflict anymore. I never did.
I just didn't know how to get out of the defensive posture long enough to imagine doing it differently. "Do you think you can?" "I think today was a start." He looked at her. I think a lot of things are starts.
She looked back at him. Malcolm, she said, ""Can I say something that might be too much?" "You've never had trouble saying too much before."" She smiled. "Fair." She put her hands around her own mug.
"I want you to know, not as a declaration, not as a conversation starter, just as a fact I want to leave on the table that I am not going anywhere. Not because of the six weeks, not because of the thing we said at the kitchen table, not because of any of the architecture we've been building. She held his gaze. I'm staying because this is where I choose to be. Every day that I'm here.
That's a choice and "I want you to know it so that when things get hard again because they will get hard again, you don't have to recalculate from scratch every time. He looked at her for a long moment. "I know," he said. "You know, or you believe it?" "Both," he said.
"Maybe for the first time." She nodded. She picked up her tea. From the living room, Ava made a small sound in her sleep, a murmur, a shift, the private language of a child deep in a dream, and both of them turned toward it instinctively. The same movement at the same moment, and then looked back at each other.